Illywhacker (86 page)

Hissao liked Gino’s. You could buy a minestrone and a bread roll for two and sixpence. There was a printed menu that showed a cartoon of a beatnik type walking up the walls above the heads of jiving couples; he left footprints on the ceiling and these footprints were repeated, in real life, up the walls and across the ceiling of Gino’s although no one had ever been known to dance there.

Hissao had been there, at the same table, the evening before, and had bought the willowy clarinettist a Bacci which, she insisted, was Italian for kiss. So he was not hiding. He was merely sitting there, playing with the sugar bowl, writing her name with salt on the table, dreaming through the clouds of espresso steam. He had finished his coffee, had scraped out the rim of remaining froth with his teaspoon, and he sat there wondering what he would do next.

Hissao was eighteen years old. He was unnaturally short for a Badgery, a little over five foot tall, but he was also nicely proportioned. When he removed his shirt, men were either surprised or thrilled (depending on their sexual predilections). He had a gymnast’s body and it was obviously the product of some serious work; yet it was made charming, almost comic, by the biscuit-barrel chest which had come to him, via his mother, from Henry Underhill.

The chest excluded (or even included) he had somehow slipped through the genetic minefields his progenitors had laid for him. Not only were his legs straight but he avoided the lonely excesses of masculinity represented by his bull-necked, jut-jawed Easter Island father. He had curling black hair, smooth olive skin, and red cherubic lips which suggested, strongly at some times, weakly at others, an oriental parent who did not exist.

This, the question of Hissao’s name and his face, was not a
thing that was, any longer, discussed in the family. It had been discussed on only one day, the day of Hissao’s christening in October 1943, when Charles had emerged into the bright light of George Street and discovered—it was brought to his attention by his angry mother-that his son was not called Michael at all but had—his mother was so cross she was spitting as she spoke—an enemy name. You could not, to be precise about it, really call this ruckus a discussion, so we can say then that the matter had never, ever, been discussed within the family. Outside the family, of course, was another matter and, as a boy at school, he had been granted no immunity.

By 1961, however, the only signs left of his childhood battles were the gymnast’s chest, the unexpected biceps, the pronounced pectorals, and the tendency to slur his name on occasions so that it came out “Sau” which was often mistaken for “Sal” or “Saul”.

For the most part he did not act like a damaged young man and his laugh, that great indicator of personality, gave the clue. When he laughed (which was often) he produced a singularly awkward noise, a great tottering tower of a laugh with chains hanging off it and odd cubicles protruding from its shaking upper storeys; not quite normal, but not damaged either, and endearing for being so awkward and, once you had got over the shock, infectious. It was a laugh to stop an old man being cynical, to make him smile, toothlessly perhaps, but smile to see that the product of a fearful imagination could turn out to be so likeable a young man.

The laugh made everyone in Gino’s look up, not at Leah Goldstein, whose unexpected entrance had precipitated it, but at Hissao.

“I want to talk to you, laddie,” said Leah and made him laugh even more and thump his foot as well. He was laughing at the joy of coincidence, the magic of chance, that Leah, who had never walked up this cabbage-dank, milky-drained laneway before should not only do it now, but choose to open Gino’s unwelcoming door, just at the time she wished to speak with him.

Consider though, as they scrape their plastic chairs around and order espressos, that here are two people who can watch a Chinaman’s finger change into a leech without suffering any great alarm. The woman once saw a man disappear before her eyes. The young man has a face that no one can satisfactorily explain. Yet they do not greet each other like beings who might, between them, change the shape of cities, of past, of future. They do not, as
they might, embrace as the children of magicians, as magicians themselves who could, if they decided to, fill the night sky with brand new neon. No, they behave like servants. They giggle like idiots because of a …
COINCIDENCE
.

They drank strong black Italian coffee and ate great fat Italian doughnuts with that little blob of jam always lying unpredictably just at the place where you cannot, even if you wish, save it to last.

Hissao, perhaps influenced by his surroundings, looked rosy-cheeked and Tuscan. Goldstein wore a silver medallion with her black roll-necked sweater. She wore a white leather coat, not because of the weather, which she had been unaware of as she dressed, but because of a shyness about her widening bum which no one who knew her would have guessed at.

“But why can’t he ask me himself?” Hissao asked when Leah had made Charles’s request. He was pleased, just the same, to be asked. His father had never before thought of him in so adult a way.

“You know he’s shy.”

“I’m his son.”

“Then you should understand him. He’s frightened you’d say no.”

“But why me?”

“Oh, you Badgerys.” Leah was smiling, but the irritation she expressed was real enough. “Why do you always angle for compliments? You
know
why.”

Hissao coloured, but he also grinned.

“It’s because I’m personable.” And Leah marvelled that it did not sound in the least conceited. It was conceited, of course. It was a classic Badgery conceit. (Perhaps not a conceit, in that it was true, but it was unpleasantly complacent.) She realized, looking at this young man whose ructious christening she had attended, that she did not know him at all, only in the way an aunt might know a nephew. He was so pretty and so sure of himself that she gave him no credit for any ambitions other than selfish ones, and even while she admitted that she was prejudiced against him, she believed her prejudice well founded.

“Whoever this man is from
Time,”
Hissao said, still smiling at her, “I’ll get on with him. That’s why you’re asking me.”

“That’s about it, I suppose.”

“I won’t lose my temper, no matter what he says.”

Leah nodded.

“This is very important to him,” Hissao said, spilling sugar
from the shaker into a neat pile on the table. “It is probably the most important thing in his life. It is like an exam for him, what do you think?”

Leah shrugged. She lacked the young’s enthusiasm for simple explanations. She was irritated by the growing pile of sugar on the table, by Hissao’s very red lips, by the dark long-lashed eyes he held her eyes with.

Don’t you try and con me, you little smarty pants, she thought.

“I wish he would ask me himself, just the same.”

“Oh, he will,” Goldstein said, standing suddenly, and she left the little coffee lounge without even shaking hands.

That afternoon his father visited him in his rented room and, as one man speaking to another, asked his help. Hissao was very moved. He shook hands with the grating firmness that men use to express their gentler emotions.

That night he went to find the clarinettist but she had returned to Melbourne and he found himself, at half-past ten at night, in bed with her friend, a very plump young lady who liked to drink rum with clove cordial in it.

Eighteen is an age that gives a false impression of life, as if every day will bring with it similar surprises. The next day was only to confirm this. Hissao still had half a reefer, a gift from the departed clarinettist. He smoked it looking at himself in the mirror of his wardrobe. The room itself was very small and gave no indication of being the room of an architecture student. There was no hint, no sketch or notebook, no paperback or snapshot, to suggest the importance of the work he would later undertake: the building that might yet—who knows—change the history of his country. Neither would you guess, from the evidence presented by either the room or its occupant, at the fierce nationalism that fuelled him. This was not a boy who would be waylaid by Henry Ford or be seduced by the beauties of cockatoos or the soft hands of Nathan Schick. He had an education. There was money behind him. He did not need to rush out and make a quid and he had an ambition that he had nurtured within him as long as he could remember.

The room will reveal no secrets to you, but I will tell you, anyway, what was in it. It had a window on to a laneway, a very narrow bed beneath the window, a dressing table opposite, and a large walnut wardrobe with a mirror, this last on the wall between bed and dressing table. There was a mirror on the dresser too, but it was the mirror on the door of the walnut wardrobe he looked
into as he smoked the reefer. His inquiry was not narcissistic but scientific—he wished to see what the drug did to his perceptions now that he had the opportunity to concentrate on something more neutral than the smooth texture and unexpected perfumes of a woman’s skin. He was disappointed to find that nothing altered very much.

“We,” he told the mirror, “are going to fix this bastard right up.”

He was referring, of course, to the gentleman employed by Henry Luce and you will note, at once, the slightly unpleasant and combative tone of the salesman but there is also so much glee contained in it, an anticipation of the joys of a difficult battle, that even a person of fine scruples, sensitive to the vulgarity of the salesman type (such as yourself, Professor) need not be offended but rather challenged by the contradiction contained herein, ie. that this crass aggression can co-exist with an ability to draw very fine moral distinctions and to see, very objectively, the damage his father’s business was doing to the fauna of the country he loved and that, further—like real estate for instance—it was one of those great Australian enterprises that generate wealth while making nothing new.

When Hissao set out to charm the fellow from
Time
he did it because he loved his naïve father and wanted to protect him from hurt. But he did not approve of the pet shop and although he imagined his father as an innocent he thought him a very dangerous innocent. He did not extend the same generosity towards his two elder brothers who were embarrassed by the pet shop for other reasons but who took money, when their father offered it, to help buy suburban houses.

So the boy was acting in bad faith? Perhaps. But he was also an optimist. He knew that the signs in the sky of this city were made only from gas and glass. He knew gas and glass could be broken, the gas set free, the glass bent into other shapes and that even the city itself was something imagined by men and women, and if it could be imagined into one form, it could be imagined into another.

He arrived by taxi outside the emporium at eight thirty to find the footpath had already been swept and hosed. This was a warm morning and the water on the footpath was evaporating. It felt humid, luxurious, grubby, tropical. The window was full of little firetails and the background had been painted with the dun-khaki that is the firetail’s dominant colour so that as the little birds flew
to and fro their bodies disappeared and only their ember-red tails showed, like flying sparks. This was Van Kraligan’s work, not his father’s. Hissao checked his reflection in the window. He had worn a conservative suit to make his father feel confident and relaxed, but the bow tie was a secret code addressed only to himself and to those few who might read it—he had stolen it, of course, from Corbusier.

The door was unlocked for the staff. Hissao, however, did not enter immediately but crossed Pitt Street and stood amongst the crowds waiting for the Woolworth’s sale. He looked across at Badgery’s Pet Emporium, at the neon-signed parrots circling his grandfather’s brightly lit window.

His grandfather, Hissao thought, was dying. So he was surprised to see him there, sitting bolt upright in his chair, like the captain on the bridge. He was dressed in a grey linen suit and a panama hat. The elastic of his tie was limp and showing at the edges of the knot, but his eyes were that splendid violet colour they would always show at the beginning of the day. Hissao, without knowing why, shivered.

“Oh, Master,” he said, and giggled.

When he entered the emporium the cannabis played its gentle tricks on him and exaggerated the rust on the white-painted cages and the odour of mildew on the stairwell. He suddenly felt very sad.

He went into his father’s office—it was tucked in neatly underneath the stairs—and stood staring at the framed photographs that had so impressed him as a boy. But Ava Gardner was already mouldy and Lee Marvin had been damaged by a leaking aquarium on the floor above and even his good wishes, sincerely meant too, had dissolved into a smudged watermark.

The sounds of the morning were all around him: the whining floor polisher, the creaking wheels of the old food pram, the groaning noises of the building itself which seemed to wheeze and fart like an old labrador, old, moth-eaten, too stubborn to die. He sat at his father’s desk and began to tidy it for him (and you can look at this fastidiousness of his as one of the few obvious reactions against his upbringing). There were consignment notes from carriers, letters from collectors, trade magazines from all over the world, the vets’ reports that his father had read out, so belligerently, to Leah Goldstein. These vets’ reports, being roneoed copies and therefore on hydroscopic paper, were damp.

It was the first occasion in his life when he had felt the sadness of time. He was overcome with it there, in his father’s office, with the damp paper between his fingers. He felt it in everything. He felt it in the rust and mildew, even in the box housing for the neon tubes above his head which he had once, in his innocence, thought so modern.

He knew why the building was so damp. Its damp courses were defective and it was built on top of the tank stream. He tried to cheer himself by imagining opening up the basement, going down to reveal the historic stream itself, having it run through transparent pipes, but he knew now what the tank stream must look like—a drain, a sewer, no different from other drains and sewers.